KENNETH ANGER
(3 February 1927 - 11 May 2023)
The American avant-garde director Kenneth Anger, who has died aged 96, made nearly forty notoriously strange short films between 1937 and 2010. Never in the mainstream, he was, however, an enormous influence on editing styles in both movies and the music video industry. He made little money from his own work but still made a mark on US cinema. Some of his films include Who Has Been Rocking My Dreamboat, Puce Moment, Fireworks, Eaux d’Artifice, Invocation of My Demon Brother and The Story of O. Scorpio Rising was his most notorious film, placing bike boys alongside Nazi emblems, nudity and Jesus Christ’s last journey to Jerusalem, all set to iconic US songs, ‘Blue Velvet’ by Bobby Vinton, ‘Torture’ by Kris Jensen and ‘I Will Follow Him’ by Little Peggy March. Obsessed by surrealism, homoerotica and the occult, he followed the occultist Aleister Crowley and Thelema, the religion that Crowley founded, its credo being to do whatever you want.
Kenneth Wilbur Ang(lemy)er was born in Santa Monica, California, to a Presbyterian family. He acted as a child and alleges that he was in the 1935 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was probably not true. His first films included Tinsel Tree for which he hand-tinted a Christmas tree (later set alight), Prisoner of Mars, merging sci-fi with the Greek Minotaur myth, and Demigods, another Greek myth about Andromeda and Perseus.
In 1944 Anger met the director Curtis Harrington and they formed Creative Film Associates to distribute their work and those of other experimental filmmakers Maya Deren and John and James Whitney. It wasn’t until 1947 that Anger made his mark with Fireworks, about homosexuality and sadomasochism, the first American gay film at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the US. It’s a fantasy, a sailor’s dream-within-a-dream that Anger said was “all I have to say about being 17, the US Navy, American Christmas and the Fourth of July.” Fireworks was charged with obscenity but was acquitted by the Supreme Court of California on the grounds that it was art, not pornography. It also led to a friendship with the sexologist Alfred Kinsey whom Anger helped with research for The Kinsey Report on the sexual habits of US men and women.
Anger moved to Paris in 1950 at the invitation of Jean Cocteau, where they became friends and Cocteau let him film one of his ballets. He also made Rabbit’s Moon with a clown gazing up from a wood to the planet, which is, according to the Japanese, the home of the rabbit. He didn’t complete it until 1970 when he took it out of storage from Henri Langlois’ Cinematheque Française. Anger worked with Langlois for several years and went to Italy to make Eaux d'Artifice about the 16th-century occultist Cardinal d’Este at the Villa d’Este, featuring its waterfalls to the music of Vivaldi.
Anger returned to America when his mother died and there met the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, but their film was destroyed by the process laboratory. He made Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, a surrealist work inspired by Crowley. It won prizes at the Belgian Cine-Club, the Prix de l’Age d’Or and was seen at Expo58 in Brussels. Back in the US he produced Scorpio Rising and, with a $10,000 grant from, of all donors, the Ford Foundation, he made Kustom Kar Kommandos, a homoerotic movie showing a man polishing a drag strip car to the sounds of ‘Dream Lover’.
Short of income, Anger collaborated with Elliott Stein on the Hollywood Babylon book of salacious gossip about the great and the good in the US film industry. A French and a pirated edition appeared first but it was not officially published in the US until 1974. There was a sequel, but volume three never appeared because of its stories about Tom Cruise and Scientology. From the 1970s, Anger still tried to make films, including Lucifer Rising for which he wanted Mick Jagger as Lucifer, although Jagger’s brother Chris was eventually cast. Anger shot more films and to make money he took his work to festivals and universities and sold the video rights.
Personal postscript. Never the soul of discretion, Anger showed his films at London’s National Film Theatre where he had demanded front row seats for his entourage. When he found the seats occupied by a Spanish contingent, there was a scuffle that ended with Anger announcing, ''Well, fuck Franco'', as witnessed by...
MICHAEL DARVELL